Interview Amin Ghaziani on Long Live Queer Nightlife April 02, 2024 Not all gay bars are the same. And so, if there are many types of gay bars, then there must be many reasons why some of them are struggling. Those that have folded faced a variety of challenges, some unique to a particular place, others more widely shared. Read More
Essay A twenty-first century medical zoo March 26, 2024 It has taken a long time for humans to recognize that they are animals. Contemporary scientific advances in the life sciences have added to that promising insight by painting a picture of humans, not as autonomous subjects, but rather, inextricably entwined with their environments, starting, for instance, with huge numbers of bacteria, microbes or viruses populating their guts and skins. Read More
Interview Leslie Valiant on The Importance of Being Educable March 26, 2024 We are at a crossroads in history. If we hope to share our planet successfully with one another and the AI systems we are creating, we must reflect on who we are, how we got here, and where we are heading. Read More
Interview Martin Thomas on The End of Empires and a World Remade March 25, 2024 Martin Thomas tells the story of decolonization and its intrinsic link to globalization. He traces the connections between these two transformative processes: the end of formal empire and the acceleration of global integration, market reorganization, cultural exchange, and migration. Read More
Essay How bad was the world’s first pandemic? March 25, 2024 What exogenous shock knocked the Roman Empire from its prosperous and peaceful pinnacle? In recent years, historians have zeroed in on an infectious outbreak known as the Antonine plague—an apparent pox-like disease that ravaged not just Rome, but several Roman cities during Marcus’ reign. Read More
Essay The wonderful world of wasps March 20, 2024 Wasps continued conservation and presence are essential for our own well-being but, rather scarily, we know very little about the world’s incredibly rich species diversity, and even less about their ecological interactions. Read More
Essay ISMs: Quotations for a new generation March 13, 2024 While Einstein, Darwin, and Jung conducted most of their intellectual work in writing, artists rarely do the same. But it is still possible to know their words. Read More
Interview Urs Gasser and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger on Guardrails March 08, 2024 What are good guardrails in today’s world of overwhelming information flows and increasingly powerful technologies, such as artificial intelligence? Read More
Interview Stephen Porder on Elemental February 27, 2024 It is rare for life to change Earth, yet three organisms have profoundly transformed our planet over the long course of its history. Read More
Essay Learning from imperial violence February 22, 2024 Historians are supposed to feel lucky when our new books align closely with topics prominently in the news. I would welcome a little less relevance for “They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence.” Read More
Essay Beyond bestiaries: the cats and dogs of Old English February 12, 2024 The words for ‘cat’ and ‘dog’ are virtually the same in Old English – hund (from which we get ‘hound’) and cat or catte (pronounced COT-tuh). Read More
Essay When is an apple not an apple? February 09, 2024 When it comes time to use images to support a written report, a presentation, or a publication, oftentimes people find themselves stumped. The early years of education introduce students to the building blocks of verbal literacy, but very few of us are taught the ways in which images communicate their magic. Read More
Essay My awkward road to unnatural extinction February 06, 2024 Successful writing projects have their tri-partite biographies, informed by the life histories of writer and subject matter and their productive encounter. Some of them are slowly formed while others are the result of a sudden insight or discovery. Read More
Interview Robin Schuldenfrei on Objects in Exile January 30, 2024 Robin Schuldenfrei reveals how the process of migration was crucial to the development of modernism. Read More
Essay Doing great deeds, or on the generosity of the rich January 17, 2024 Across history the rich have achieved plenty of things from which we continue to benefit. Surely, they did it for their own benefit, and to bolster their social status—in plainer words, to show off and to impress their fellow patricians—but the fact remains that we benefit aesthetically from their efforts. Read More